Friday, July 12, 2013

UNO English Professor Robert Shenk recently won honorable mention for an international
award for a book he wrote last year on black sea destroyers in World War I.

A University of New Orleans professor recently won honorable mention for an international
award, thanks to a book he wrote last year about a small fleet of Naval ships that
sailed the Black Sea during World War I.

"I only won honorable mention, but I was delighted to win anything!" said Robert Shenk,
a professor of English at UNO and a retired captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

Shenk recently learned that he received an honorable mention award in the U.S. Naval
History category of the 2012 John Lyman Book Awards of the North American Society
for Oceanic History. His book, America's Black Sea Fleet: The U.S. Navy Amidst War and Revolution, 1919-1923, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2012.

An Officer and a Gentleman

The Naval Institute Press has previously published four Shenk books surrounding Naval
life and history. Five years ago, the University Press of South Carolina also published
Shenk's edition, Playships of the World: The Naval Diaries of Admiral Dan Gallery, 1920–1924.

As a naval officer, Shenk served as communications officer of the USS Harry E. Hubbard
(DD-748) on service that included two deployments to the South China Sea in the late
1960s. He also spent a year on river patrol boats in the Mekong and Vam Co Tay Rivers
of Vietnam.

Shenk not only continued inactive duty with the Naval Reserves, he later spent three
years teaching English at the Air Force Academy and three years teaching English at
the Naval Academy, while on 16 years of voluntary recall to active duty. Now, he coordinates
the graduate English program at UNO.

Puzzling Through History

While writing his biography about U.S. Navy Admiral Dan Gallery, Shenk and his friend
(and future co-author) Herb Gilliland discovered diaries from the admiral's youth
in the stacks of Special Collections at the Naval Academy.

"When I read those colorful accounts of Gallery's first four years of commissioned
service, I became intrigued by the young officer's description of his six-month tour
of duty at Constantinople in 1922–23, this while serving aboard the old armored cruiser
Pittsburgh," wrote Shenk in the preface to his most award-winning book.

"Clearly, most Navy people relished the uproarious highlife of Constantinople's European
quarter, despite some of them having just witnessed enormous human tragedies only
a couple of hours' cruise away. Fascinated, I began looking into why America had sent
that very small fleet to its four-year home in the Bosporus Strait to begin with."

He knew nearly nothing then of "this important Naval episode," Shenk said this week.

"Lots of other people are surprised," said Shenk, a graduate coordinator at UNO. "I
have since discovered that the United States once had a small fleet in the Black Sea!"

Threading Details Together

Shortly into his research, Shenk read a book on the burning of Smyrna, authored by
Marjorie Housepian Dobkin and published in 1971, Shenk said. Tens of thousands died
and suffered "miseries beyond imagination" in the crisis, he said, noting that nearly
200,000 ethnic Greek and Armenian refugees evacuated Smyrna, helped by officers and
men stationed on American destroyers in the harbor.

Dobkin's account highlighted a U.S. Navy shore patrol of several dozen men and a civilian
relief team sent by the admiral, whose American relief team was the only one operating
ashore.

Shenk soon visited in Dobkin in New York to hear more of her compelling research.

"Not only her encouragement, but also her example of successfully searching for naval
accounts beyond official reports were especially important in an early stage of this
project," said Shenk. "Her example would stimulate me to similar efforts."

Early into his research, Shenk learned that the Smyrna catastrophe was only one among
several great humanitarian crises, tragedies and atrocities the Bosporus-based American
naval detachment encountered in four short years, he said. American naval vessels
and troops also responded to an evacuation of more than 150,000 White Russians from
the Crimea to Constantinople and endured a great famine in southern Russia. Both crises
were outgrowths of the Russian Revolution.

Around the same time, tens of thousands of innocent Turkish minorities were killed
deep in Anatolian Turkey in the region known as the Pontus, Shenk said. They were
primarily ethnic Greeks.

"Two American destroyer captains recognized that they were witnessing something very
terrible indeed and made fervent pleas for their admiral's intervention," said Shenk
in the preface to his book. "Since the Navy detachment commander, Adm. Mark Bristol,
was not entirely willing to entertain this viewpoint, both of these officers risked
their careers by doing so."

An A-ha Moment

Shenk believed that the "Black Sea Express" mirrored the Yangtze Patrol that America
maintained in China for decades during the same time period. A former destroyer sailor,
Shenk had studied the Yangtze Patrol and knew that many of the fleets in the Black
Sea Express were destroyers, "four-pipers" or "flushdeckers," he said.

"Increasingly, it seemed to me that someone ought to consider America's Black Sea
navy at book length," said Shenk.

"...While I knew I certainly was not a novelist, and although I was a literature specialist
rather than a historian, no doubt I write with more appetite for the sea story and
colorful detail than some historians would appreciate," said Shenk.

"Eventually I considered that I might be able to portray well the various events that
took place in that long-forgotten age."